According to The Tech Report AMD representative Suzy Pruitt commented on the future of Quad FX. “The short answer is that while there are still engineering resources focused on future platform offerings that build off Quad FX, the current energy and effort has gone into programs and product initiatives like Spider and AMD has discontinued future planning and development of its eight-core enthusiast platform at this time.”

Pruitt continued, “We will continue to support customers that have an existing Quad FX with DSDC and are also working on an upgrade path for those customers. While AMD is not actively promoting AMD Opteron processor as a 2P enthusiast solution, we recognized that there are enthusiasts who are looking for two-socket solutions and think an Opteron platform is well-suited to meet that demand at this time.”

After all the promises ad statements by AMD that Quad FX was the companies enthusiast future, AMD has apparently decided to all but kill the platform off. The few enthusiasts who plunked down the big dollars required to adopt the platform should be feeling a bit uncomfortable right now.

If AMD had put 10% of the effort they put into Quad-FX into working with their partners to make dual Opteron motherboards better, that would have had a good payoff in making the Opteron platform stronger for content development, game development, and high-end gamers.

The erstwhile invention of a new platform only for gamers (and not content creators), Quad-FX, was pure stupidity.

Meanwhile AMD has sat on HTX for years and developed essentially nothing that would make HyperTransport a market force. If AMD had developed a game physics processor for HTX, that might have been interesting. And there were already a number of Opteron motherboards with HTX.

In a couple years Intel is hitting the beach with its Nehalem stormtroopers. You can be sure Intel will not be stupid and will have all sorts of cool stuff you can plug into a QuickPath socket.

Although I have a number of Opteron systems, they are all being retired and replaced with Intel. Today's Intel systems offer greater stability, greater compatibility, and better performance/watt.

Unfortunately AMD has done nothing of late other than show that they are riding a one trick pony -- the integrated memory controller -- into a dusty oblivion over the hills of Brokeback Mountain.